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Next-Gen Atom To Use PowerVR; Good Or Bad?

Phoronix: Next-Gen Atom To Use PowerVR; Good Or Bad?

While some of Intel's Atom processors use PowerVR graphics (the notorious Poulsbo and now Moorestown), the vast majority of the Atom CPUs on the market take advantage of Intel's own graphics technologies developed in-house. This allows Intel to provide Linux support via their mainline open-source driver and overall the support is quite good. However, it seems with the next-generation Atom CPUs, this will change...

I'll be honest. This might suck for Linux/FOSS fanatics, but for the regular developers who just want to write apps that work, this is pretty awesome. The PowerVR chips are more powerful and less power-hungry than Intel's crappy chips. I care 50x more about that than I ever would about supporting a platform that I already can't support for a million reasons besides its lacking driver support.

Anyway, what it is important to an atom is the low power usage (20W mainboard + CPU, no fans required if you use a picopsu) and 2D, it is perfect for internet, office, 720p video or light 24h storage server. Having a low mediocre 3D graphics or mid mediocre 3D graphics makes no diference.

this should be great for mobile-device linux, as the chipset will bring OpenCL support and good mobile-graphics performance to intel powered tablets and smartphones.

while powerVR's drivers have always sucked with x86 on linux this cannot purely be the fault of powerVR, because they power my n900 mameo phone just fine, and have done an equally good job of powering bada and android phones.

while powerVR's drivers have always sucked with x86 on linux this cannot purely be the fault of powerVR, because they power my n900 mameo phone just fine, and have done an equally good job of powering bada and android phones.

The PowerVR Maemo drivers are not without their shortcomings - they don't have vsync, which results in occasional heavy tearing. The driver also has an unfortunate habit of crashing the xserver for no apparent reason and without warning - see Maemo bug 9150.

Also, all the closed drivers (including the PowerVR ones) preclude upgrading the the default 2.6.28 kernel to some more recent version.

Never been an atom user anyway (I was/am still stuck with old VIA chips, lol) but I am happy to have the AMD APUs as a real alternative in this area, since I never trusted ImgTec. And if intel wants another poulsbo desaster, so be it.